Eric Mullarky in a screen shot from his video promo for “The Insidious Imps” Kickstarter campaign.
Courtesy of Eric Mullarky

BLOOMFIELD TWP. >> When you think of “imps,” you might be thinking of mischievous children. So cute.

But not so with Eric Mullarky’s movie imps. They’re more like horrible goblins, and he wants your help to make them complete. He’s started a Kickstarter campaign to get his film project completed.

Cain and Abel — named, of course, for the biblical rivals — are goblins who love to cause trouble. Abel wants to pull harmless pranks like hiding the remote control, disconnecting electrical cords and unscrewing the top of the salt-shaker. Cain, though, seeks more destruction and violence. The two clash over how to deal with the family they share a home with — and especially the baby of the family, an enticing target.

In his short horror film, “The Insidious Imps,” Mullarky combines live action with the 2D-animated imps, designed by young Pennsylvania animator Jareed Dempsey. This is “a technique that is becoming rarer in filmmaking and is practically nonexistent in horror,” he says.

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Having created and self-published comic books and graphic novels under his New Baby Productions banner, he is transitioning into filmmaking as writer and director of this short.

Mullarky turned to the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform to help him finish “The Insidious Imps.” Backers of his short can get digital downloads of the film, their name in the credits, T-shirts, invitations to screenings even appear in the movie if the campaign reaches its $8,000 funding goal by June 22. According to Kickstarter rules, if the campaign fails to reach its goal, donors get their pledges back.

Mullarky wants some of the funds to shoot the live-action portion of the film.

“I want to rent the right equipment and acquire all the needed permits and licenses. The rest of the funds will be used to help with the effects and other post-production needs,” he said in an interview with The Oakland Press.

He hopes to enter the completed film into film festivals. “And if it proves popular enough, I would like to expand the story from a short film into a full-length movie that could be screened in theaters,” Mullarky said.

His dream is to “follow in the footsteps of Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock and Guillermo del Toro.”

Mullarky, 35, studied economics and math at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater before moving to Bloomfield Township, where he lives with his wife, Kindra, and two children, Alaena, 6, and Myles, 4. In his day job, he is a data analyst at Crittenton Hospital in Rochester Hills.

“This is my first true project involving animation,” Mullarky said. “A couple of years ago, I worked as part of a team that adapted one of my graphic novels, ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ — based on a short story by the legendary H.G. Wells — into a screenplay.

“We shopped it around and got some interest from producers and a couple of notable actors, but the project never really made it anywhere due to being ‘too grand in scale’ — i.e. requiring too much money to make. It was a lot of fun, was a great learning experience, and I made a lot of nice connections. I have always been interested in filmmaking, so I decided to work on a project that was much smaller in scale with a higher likelihood of being completed. And with my background in self-publishing comics, working with animation seemed like a logical fit.”

Mullarky is promoting the Kickstarter campaign at Motor City Comic Con in Novi all weekend with a table in Artist Alley.

“All of my research on running a successful campaign has shown me that it needs a really good start, and being at Comic Con will allow me to reach out to thousands of people during that first weekend who would potentially be interested in it,” he said. “I will be giving out exclusive button sets to anyone who backs the campaign and then visits me at the convention.”

His previous comic experience includes a series called “Elemental Fources,” about a group of superheroes with powers based around the four elements of wind, water, earth and fire.

“More recently, I published the aforementioned H.G. Wells’ ‘The Chronic Argonauts,’ a graphic novel based on an early short story about time travelers by the author that was published before his more famous novel, ‘The Time Machine.’ The graphic novel can be found in the Amazon Kindle store, the Apple iBookstore and other ebook formats.

For information more on the “Insidious Imps” Kickstarter project, or to become a backer, visit www.ImpsFilm.com.